Drop bars or flat bars? Drop bars usually have a much shorter top tube than flat bar bikes. When your hands are on the hoods on a drop bar bike, your hands are quite far forward from the steerer tube, but on a flat bar bike your hands are not as far in front of the steerer.

Almost all my bikes are drop bars. I focus much more on the top tube length than on seat tube (or effective seat tube) height. The reason for that is that you can change reach on a drop bar bike with different stem lengths, but the range from short stem to long stem is a pretty small range.

But seat tube heights, you can vary the amount of seatpost sticking up above the frame by a lot.

Standover height is important too, but in this era of sloping top tubes, a bike with inadequate standover height is very rare, so that is the last thing I look at instead of the first.